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USB 3.0 vs. eSATA: Is faster better?

Up-to-date computers now include external ports that, in theory, can handle data at rates of up to 5 Gigabits per second. But which is better?

If you’ve been in the computer business for any length of time you can probably painfully remember when serial RS-232 ports could barely handle 28 Kilobytes per second. And, adding insult [...]

Linux and USB 3.0

Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn’t? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it.

Linux started supporting USB 3.0 in the September 2009 [...]

Is your secure USB flash drive really secure?

If you’re like me, you’ve taken to carrying important data on USB sticks or flash drives. They’re handy, you can use them on any PC, and with built-in encryption even if you lost them it was no big deal. Bad news: It’s now a big deal.

The German security company SySS GmbH discovered that many, but [...]

Sidekick: Microsoft’s biggest failure yet?

You can’t make stuff this bad up. Many T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone users lost all their contacts, calendar entries, photographs, you name it, when Sidekick’s back-end software provider Microsoft, Danger, went down.

Danger turned out to be an all too apt name. Sidekick users use the Danger servers to synchronize their smartphone’s content with a cloud-based storage [...]

Good-bye hard drive? Will PC hard-disks die next year?

I’m old enough to remember when some of the first hard drives, such as the IBM Winchester-two disks with 30MBs each, hence 30/30, thus Winchester after the 30/30 rifle-showed up. I can also recall using cassette-tapes and 8-inch floppy disks on PCs. I’ve met people in their twenties who are unclear about what cassette-tapes are [...]